Paradise Lust (15 page)

When she retuned to her laptop a few minutes later, the screen was still black. She tapped the spacebar a few times and nothing happened. Moved her fingers over the mouse touchpad. Nothing. She frantically clicked keys on the keyboard, pressed and held the power button again, banged her entire flat palm over all the keys on the keyboard at once—the screen remained black.

Leaning close to investigate the laptop closer, she saw a bit of brownish-red discoloration on the side. Upon closer examination, she saw that it had spread along most of one side of the computer, all the way inside the USB port and headphone plug-in. She tried to think of alternate explanations for what the discoloration could be, but there was really only one explanation: rust.

Suddenly, she became aware of something that she somehow hadn’t seen before—that the entire table had a sheen of wetness, with small puddles collected along its irregular wooden surface. She plucked her laptop up and found, to her deep dismay, a shallow pool of water beneath it. A salty smell hit her nose. Seawater.

“Shit,” she whispered.

Beyond the railing of the side porch, was a small inlet, a usually gentle and small body of water where locals liked to hang out with fishing poles and a large bottle of Bintang and wile away the afternoons. During the rogue wave fiasco, sea and rainwater must have caused the inlet to surge, sending it flowing up over the banks, across her small lawn, and up onto the porch. Her computer was waterlogged. Ruined.

She stood still for a moment, as if afraid to move until she’d catalogued the damage. Mentally, she ticked over all the reasons this new development was horrible: money, for one thing; inconvenience; all the photos and music she hadn’t backed up; her documents—her documents.

“Shit,” she said again, the realization dawning on her in all its terrible clarity. This had been her work laptop at GreenGrub, and it held all the files related to her work there. The business plan, internal memos, goals, the company manual, plus everything related to her failed attempt to fight Organify: legal documents, half-started appeals, email drafts that she’d never sent.

And now it was all gone.

On some level, perhaps it didn’t matter, and yet those documents allowed her to believe that maybe someday GreenGrub could be resurrected, or that she would find a legal loophole that would destroy Organify; at the very least, they were memories, and visible evidence of the good work that she’d once done.

She closed her eyes and inhaled through her nose, then let out a long, deep breath. Now was not the time to think about this. She shook her head wildly, as if to fling out any lingering thoughts about her electronic loss, placed the computer back on the table, and went back inside. Fumbling through her things, she found a pad of paper and a pen, and sat down to write the old-fashioned way.

By the time she got up from the table and crawled into bed, the first pulses of orange dawn had begun to warm the night sky toward the horizon.

Chapter 23

Though he’d slept with his door ajar—open, even—almost every one of the many nights that he’d stayed at the resort, Danny was annoyed that Val hadn’t closed it that night. He didn’t feel the things that an open door implied: happy, open, welcoming. He felt like lying on his couch and covering his face with a throw pillow and waking up many hours, maybe even a few days, later.

As it were, the door was ajar, and the idea of struggling off the couch and hobbling across the room to shut it seemed too exhausting for Danny to contemplate, so ajar it remained. The same outside noises that had been his lullaby for weeks now caused him great irritation, even a hint of panic. Lying awake on the couch, he willed the birds to fly to some other island, the cicadas to shut up, the waves—at the thought of waves his stomach clenched—to stop forever. However, he must have fallen asleep at some point, because when he next opened his eyes, the pale blue of early morning was visible in the sliver of sky the door revealed.

Today was the day they all left.

Danny figured he would stare at his ceiling for a while and wait for some other, more productive thought to enter his mind. Or for him to get hungry or need to use the bathroom. Until one of those three things happened, he was staying put.

At some point later, he thought he heard a light patter on his front porch, followed by the whisper of something soft brushing against the wood grain. He lifted his head slightly to hear better, but all was silent.

“Hello?” His voice was hoarse from so many hours of not speaking. He cleared his throat. “Someone there?”

But he was met with complete silence. He must have imagining it.

The reality that Adele left today suddenly hit him with its full, uncompromising force. He must have been hoping that she would come knock on his door before she left, that somehow she would have come up with words that made everything okay. What he understood now was that this wouldn’t happen, that she would leave the resort without saying goodbye—or anything—to him, and shortly after that would be on a bus to Ubud and, later, a plane to a destination 8,000 miles away. He let his head fall back onto the pillow.

“Good luck, Adele” he said, almost involuntarily, and was surprised to feel that he really meant it. “And goodbye.”

He jerked his head up again as the sound of light patter returned. His entire body tense, he lay completely still, neck straining, ears listening for any sound of movement, barely breathing.

Some five minutes later, he relaxed back down onto the cushion. It had been nothing.

Chapter 24

When she’d arrived at the dingy Balinese airport, Adele had a profoundly different reaction to it than she had upon first seeing it some six weeks before. That first time, the island had been new, the adventure about to unfold, her body coursing with anticipation and nervous energy. It had been exciting and “exotic.” Today, the corrupt guards and swindling taxi drivers and gray towers of exhaust fumes and hot, rotting garbage and folding chairs by the gates did not seem new or exciting. It all depressed her.

It was the only thing she had to focus on, unfortunately. She’d already said goodbye to her peers—most of the group had later flights and so were still up in the mountain town of Ubud, where they’d passed the second (comparatively uneventful) half of their yoga training, and the two women who had accompanied her in Yande’s van, Liesse and Karli, were flying to Europe out of a different terminal. She’d already forced a breakfast down her throat. She couldn’t focus enough to read. And the other things to think about—the
real
things—she didn’t feel up to yet.

When they left the beachside resort in the early morning hours, two days after the day that had changed everything, Adele had sat in the very back seat and looked out the window at Danny’s hut until it was a speck that she couldn’t differentiate from any other specks. It had felt melodramatic, maybe, but necessary. As soon as it was gone from site, she’d turned forward, taken a deep breath, and committed her full mental and physical energy to her personal yoga practice and inner journey for the remainder of her time in Bali. As tended to happen when Adele set a goal for herself, she achieved it, and Danny had stayed on the periphery of her thoughts for three weeks.

But now there were no headstands or crow pose or eight limbs of yoga to fill her mind. Now there were only folding chairs and rotting garbage and the thoughts she’d held at bay so successfully for all this time.

Mercifully, and miraculously, her flight was not delayed, and soon she found herself settled into her window seat, the warm roar of the plane’s engine calming her mind and soothing her muscles. She closed her eyes and blankness filled her mind again. It was beautiful.

As the plane began to lift from the runway, she opened her eyes. The ground below fell away—the industrial chaos of the airport, the squalor of the surrounding shanties, the thick and vast morass of the green jungle enveloping everything beyond a certain radius, and then the perimeter of white sand and turquoise blue water. It was so beautiful and so flawed, so unique and yet so understandable, so
Bali
, that she felt a lump in her throat as she watched the small, strange, messy, beautiful, simple, nonsensical island grow smaller and smaller below her.

After the plane breached a layer of clouds and the land was no longer visible, she turned from the window and closed her eyes again. This time, however, she was not met with a blank mind.

That last night at the beach resort, when she’d begun writing, she’d had no clear notion of what she would put on the paper. She just sat and let her fingers move the pen, and soon half a page was full of thoughts, feelings, phrases, and images. Once the entire page had been filled up with a sort of stream-of-consciousness brain dump, her writing began to take on a more directed form. Soon, she knew exactly what she wanted—
needed
—to write. She’d ripped the filled-up pages out and began anew on a fresh sheet.

There was something she’d been circling around in her mind the entire time she’d been on the island, something that had to do with the relationship between yoga and Danny. She’d never formulated it that clearly before, but that’s what it was: they both had such similar effects on her, both seemed foreign and inaccessible at first, and then quickly became the most natural thing in the world. Both brought her a kind of clarity and simplicity that she’d not experienced since childhood. How could this one man, a privileged white American who works a morally bankrupt but lucrative job, share so many commonalities with an ancient spiritual practice meant to help humans achieve enlightenment, transcendence? Adele didn’t think she could answer that question, but she knew she needed to write about it.

Yoga is often defined as a practice meant to transform the body and the mind. Literally, the Sanskrit word yoga means “to unite”. Think about that. Transformation of body and mind through union. Sounds kind of like a description of love, doesn’t it?

But I don’t think that’s most people’s experience of love. Sure hasn’t been mine. It’s always more of a struggle to fit together than a “union”, and the only transformations were things like me wearing my hair down more frequently to please my boyfriend of the moment.

After meeting you, though, I see that definition of yoga and it sounds like the perfect description of love. I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever see you again. But every single time that I practice yoga from now on, it will carry with it the memory of our brief union and the lasting transformation it caused in me.

Every pose will make me think of you for a different reason. As I find my way into my expression of each posture, there you’ll be.

You are downward-facing dog, the asana that at first feels so unfamiliar and strange, that literally turns you upside down, but that soon begins to feel like home.

You are sirsana, headstand, the scariest of poses, the one that requires a leap of faith, that does not tolerate any hidden inhibitions, but that, once you find your way into the right alignment, feels stronger and safer than any other posture.

You are savasana. Complete ease and relaxation, a letting go of everything that I don’t even know I’ve been holding, becomes possible with you. I release, I’m at ease, and true peace seems possible.

She’d continued on writing through the night, covering every pose in her asana manual. For each one, she didn’t have to think for more than a moment about how Danny embodied the position; it became clear almost immediately. It took her many hours, but in some ways it was the easiest thing she’d ever written.

After she’d finished, the faint glow of sunrise had begun to push out the night sky, and she crawled into bed and immediately fell asleep. When she awoke, disoriented, only an hour or two later, she suddenly became acutely aware of the fact that the vans were departing in thirty minutes and she hadn’t begun packing. Her cabin-mate Diana seemed to have already packed her things and left.

In a ten-minute frenzy of adrenaline and flying sports bras, Adele managed to cram everything—even her water-logged laptop—into her bags, throw on some sunglasses and a sweatshirt, and even brush her teeth. She said a final goodbye to the small hut that had been her shelter for the past three weeks, and tugged her suitcase down the steps of the front porch and toward the grassy field. She left her front door open, a practice she sadly realized she’d need to abandon once she returned to the States.

As she passed Danny’s hut, she paused. She held the pages she’d written in her hand, and hadn’t yet made up her mind about whether to give them to him. She’d been putting off that decision, thinking the right answer would just come to her. But there was no putting it off any longer, and no answer had come.

Before one more thought could cross her mind, she set down her bags in the long grass and began walking toward the hut, papers in hand. She crept up his steps as silently as possible, and placed the pages so they were peeking out from under a sculptural piece of driftwood that Danny kept on his porch.

“Hello?” Her heart stopped. His voice. He was talking to her—even if he didn’t know it—something she hadn’t been sure she’d ever experience again. “Someone there?”

She resisted the urge to respond, knowing she wouldn’t know what to say, that the van would be leaving in minutes, that it made no sense. She stayed perfectly still, holding her breath.

After what seemed like several minutes, she heard him speak again. “Good luck, Adele. And goodbye.”

Those words were too much for her. She fled down the steps, not quite as carefully as before, and toward her bags. Had he known it was her? He couldn’t have. Regardless, those words—good luck, goodbye—carried with them such fatal finality, such tragic poignancy, that she couldn’t keep the tears inside.

She hastily wiped any residue of tears from her face as she approached Yande, waiting patiently by his van smoking a cigarette, and silently willed him not to ask her if she was okay. He didn’t. She took a middle seat between Priya and Janine, all the other seats already occupied. The ride up to Ubud was strangely traffic-free and silent.